Now that’s the opposite of everything I’ve ever been taught.
What I have discovered over the years is that focusing my efforts directly at potential clients;
- Took a lot of time and cost a lot of money
- Ended up generating a lot of unqualified leads that wasted a lot of my time
- After every transaction, I was left having to go and find another client
Between networking, prospecting, giving sales presentations and writing up proposals, how much time do you spend per sale? If you know what you are worth per hour to your business, multiply that number times the number of hours you spent prospecting and divide it by the number of new clients you obtained. Between boosting ads, paying marketing people, printing, sponsorship and all of the other forms paid for advertising and marketing how much do you spend a year? Divide that by the number of new clients you obtained. Total the two and see what you really spent per new client. Next year, you’ll have to spend the same in order to achieve the same. If you want more new clients, you’ll probably have to spend even more.
Developing a strategic partner takes a bit longer. Sifting through the talkers, building even deeper relationships and training them how to pre-qualify new clients for you may actually take five to ten times longer than building a typical client/provider relationship. So why am I encouraging it? Let’s do some more math.
If the traditional methods resulted in your spending an average of five hours per new client and building a strategic partnership could take you up to fifty hours it’s easy to see why most people don’t do it. If that strategic partner gives you five new clients you actually ended up ten hours per client, double what you would have the traditional way. So again, why do I recommend such a method.
Next year, how much time will you have to spend with that strategic partner in order to get those five new clients from them? WAM! At the end of year two, your efforts have yielded ten new clients and after year three, fifteen new clients. That fifty hours you invested in year one is looking much better now isn’t it?
What happens when you have established twenty of these strategic partnerships? One new client every year with no networking, prospecting, marketing or advertising. What are you going to do with all of this extra time?
My goal is to help you to become more successful in less time. If you want to explore this more, visit a WAM! meeting or talk to me.
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